How is it that land ownership is just, when rent, the gain in assets/income, is not a return on labor?
When a man sells 8 hours of his labor for 100$, we see that this is just because he owns his body and agrees contractually to use it in someone elses plan in exchange for money?
When that man, instead of spending his income on luxuries, saves the difference between subsistence and income he creates capital. We see that this is just, as capital is merely what returns on labor are not consumed.
When a man, sitting on a title of ownership to a plot of land, allows a farmer to work it for 500$ a month, how is this in agreement with the notion of property?
Consider that a child born into a town with a very narrow concentration of land ownership, already owes a landlord rent because of its existence on another's supposed property.
Locke's treatise on land declares that mixing one's labor with a virgin plot of land transfers the just title of said land to said labormixer. But he gave a condition for the justice of that statement: that land of like quality abounded. So even if there were further plots of arable land, albeit of lesser quality than the superior homesteaded land, the standard Lockean notion does not meet the condition. Societies such as these, generally known as frontier societies, are short-lived. Men go out and claim land or states survey the land and auction it off (usually to cronies leveraged up, expecting that the land they buy will be accompanied by such an increase in population and productivity that the payments on interest will be nothing compared to the rent received.)
Locke saw a problem with private ownership of land without recompense, as did Ricardo, Smith, Mill, Spencer, Nock and Chodorov. These thinkers/writers constitute a great bulk of the classical-liberal intellectual legacy. They generally held that the justice of a system of property and free exchange was incomplete without a resolution to the problem of private ownership of land without recompense.
History is instructive on the effects of a concentration of land ownership. In the UK's industrial revolution, approximately a quarter of England's land was seized and sold of to industrialists. What followed was a poverty for the working class far worse than an agricultural subsistence lifestyle, precisely because there was no working-proprietor class to hold up the wage market. Their means of attaining a wage more attractive than that of working as a farmer was pulled out from underneath them and they slipped into an era of servitude, when young women had to work away their youth so as not to go the winter without a warm coat. Even if an industrialist wanted to be charitable to wage-earners he could not fight the market price of labor. Throughout all of this, productivity and population rose, boosting the value of land and enriching the land holder by virtue of his ownership.
Similar scenario's occurred in Germany (see:http://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/111heil.html), where a lopsided relation of land ownership disillusioned the populace of political liberty. In the US, massive tracts of land were given away cheaply alongside railroad projects (as Rothbard documented) and in general. Mining and water rights gave landholders the right to entire veins of mineral or entire springs of water. A class of "robber-barons" ensued from these gifts of the public breast. While some American entrepreneurs were able to establish fortunes great enough to influence the institution of education in a broad and general sense, NYC residents lived in one-room-nine-person apartments. Yes one might attribute this to immigration and state handouts, but that land relations have played such an instrumental role in the distribution of wealth historically ought to invite curiousity from anyone paying attention. Those nations which have had a concentrated ownership of land have also had a class of paupers far poorer than any farmer, while those nations whose land ownership is spread broadly had independently wealthy farmers and workers.
The effects of concentrated land ownership and property in land without recompense become less significant to us now, as many Americans are homeowners (well... the banks are homeowners in essence, but you know what I mean) and technology, stock of capital goods, and division of labor are all more fully developed. But the injustice remains in visible form in countries such as Russia (which recently underwent a transition to a quasi-market economy) and third world countries, where the many serve slavishly the fantasically wealthy few.
How can you justify the continuation of private property in land without recompense to those excluded from said land when rent is not a return on labor, direct or indirect, when the fixed supply of land makes Locke's treatise applicable to only a brief window of human history, and when the evidence of narrow ownership of land speaks volumes on the poverty of the lowest class and the wealth of the highest class?
The Anarch is to the Anarchist what the Monarch is to the Monarchist. -Ernst Jünger
I used to be a georgist. Now I think that a narrow homesteading view solves these problems. In this way, any property that is owned and rented out is the product of labor, not of decree. I think of homesteading of matter on a particle by particle basis. Any matter you dominate is yours. If you build a house, you don't automatically have claim to the fields arounds it. So any claims on this basis are just. I prefer this to the idea of the "technological unit" which I see as ill defigned (yes even in comparison to homesteading by control).
From the link you posted "according to official statistics the value of the output of the small farms was up to 47 per cent higher than that of the large estates; in dairy farming even up to 69 per cent higher."
http://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/111heil.html
Certainly in a free market the junkers and the nobility would have simply been outcompeted by the more efficient farmers. The nobility would have had to sell their land with all the debt they had if the government didn't help them, the problem of unequal land ownership would have almost solved itself.
The situation seems very similar to the land bubble in the United States today. The answer to the land question is to drop agricultural subsidies, tariffs, ect. and and let land values drop
Land ownership is a pre-requisite for labor and productive anything for that matter. It's the place where you labor. If you give up laboring because someone else offers to labor there, then you give up your labor space for a share in their labor-profits.
I am not sure I understand where your question is coming from Jargon.
Are you implying that there are certain kind if incomes that are "just" and others that are "unjust" based on some formula where you decide what perntage of it is earned by labor?
Are you following Marxian theory that land owners control everything and therefore land has to be nationalised? Are you saying we should outlaw interst bearing accounts because the interest did not involve enough labor for your liking? Is owning a rental car business then unjust too?
Private property rights are an absolute right for liberty and free markets. In the olden days when the feudal landlord owned the land and therefore the fruit of the land and pretty much the subjects as serfs, your argument might hold.
But as long as EVERYBODY in the picture has their private rights protected, your argument becomes moot. Even if one tyrant owns every square inch of land on earth, who is going to tend his cattle, make leather for shoes, air condition his palace, run the oilfields and electric power plants? How will he eat without labor to grow manufacture and cook the food.??? If all he owns is land, he will have to buy his services with pieces of his land- so inevitably there will be more and more landowners.
Land is just one form of private property that can be used as a resource. If he can earn $1000 a month by farming his own land, but he is too lazy or too evil or too selfish, or too smart or too greedy to do it, he may rent it out to the farmer for less work on his behalf but for an easier income. His motivation or how he got to own the farm is utterly irrelevant to this scenario.
The farmer can calculate that he can afford to farm the land, pay the rent and still make a decent living and he enters into the trade voluntarily. Nobody is holding a gun to his head. If he thinks he can make more money by inventing Facebook or Microsoft in his parents garage he may do so. He does not need land to profit.
If he rents out bulldozers or taxis or his knowledge by writing a book, he is also just utilizing his resources like the land owner. I do not understand why you want to villify the landlord.
How come in your scenario the idle lazy landlord villian got his land unfairly but the kid that inherited his dads bulldozer or truck or fishing pole is noble? Should all inheritances be banned?
Land ownership is a pre-requisite for labor and productive anything for that matter. It's the place where you labor.
Exactly.
I am not proposing that land ownership be abolished. I am proposing that land ownership without recompense to any that might have used it be abolished. In this way, the constant degradation of soil characteristic to the old days of barbarism is resolved, but the injustice of land monopoly is also resolved by confiscating rent and directing it towards a citizens dividend (total rent value / total residents to relevant location).
dude6935: I used to be a georgist. Now I think that a narrow homesteading view solves these problems. In this way, any property that is owned and rented out is the product of labor, not of decree. I think of homesteading of matter on a particle by particle basis. Any matter you dominate is yours. If you build a house, you don't automatically have claim to the fields arounds it. So any claims on this basis are just. I prefer this to the idea of the "technological unit" which I see as ill defigned (yes even in comparison to homesteading by control).
Except that this notion of property is not acknowledged by any arbiter of property disputes. And if it were, it would result in a frantic dash to be the first "homesteader" of the "particles" of land, meaning a constant state of transition in land ownership and all the costs associated therewith.
Albert: I am not sure I understand where your question is coming from Jargon. Are you implying that there are certain kind if incomes that are "just" and others that are "unjust" based on some formula where you decide what perntage of it is earned by labor?
No and Yes. Just as many recognize that it is unjust for a pickpocket to claim as his income the wallet of a pedestrian. It is unjust for any unjust debt to remain unresolved.
The formula which decides justice is property, and the commonly accepted determinant of property is either exchange through pre-existing property or property created through labor. The subjective theory of value is not being challenged here. There is no reference to Marxism.
Why should one infer this from what I've written? As capital is merely indirect labor. Outlawing interest bearing accounts is harmonious with outlawing one from underconsuming and creating tools with the remaining produce, which obviously a violation of property rights.
Private property rights are an absolute right for liberty and free markets.
We're much agreed.
In the olden days when the feudal landlord owned the land and therefore the fruit of the land and pretty much the subjects as serfs, your argument might hold.
Except that it was actually worse for slaves once they became sharecropppers because their masters were no longer responsible for their health to such a degree that they could remain productive. That was no longer the landowners concern. And so the sharecropper, with no alternative occupation, was thrust into a rock-bottom labor market determined by impersonal factors.
But as long as EVERYBODY in the picture has their private rights protected, your argument becomes moot.Even if one tyrant owns every square inch of land on earth, who is going to tend his cattle, make leather for shoes, air condition his palace, run the oilfields and electric power plants? How will he eat without labor to grow manufacture and cook the food.??? If all he owns is land, he will have to buy his services with pieces of his land- so inevitably there will be more and more landowners.
Except no one will be able to use any of it. Everyone needs his permission to use it. He can charge whatever price he likes. Because he owns all of the land which men require to stand upon and use their own bodies and minds. No one is denying here that land ownership, or even a total monopoly of all land (god forbid) precludes a division of labor. But a division of labor is but one component of the societal distribution of wealth. If all he owns is land, all he has to do is nothing, because no one can do anything without his permission. That is the king's right.
Would you dare to kill the king's deer?
As is this entire paragraph. I'm not interested in what people will do. I already know that.
I believe that you are misunderstanding the problem. Any property is valid on the basis of a voluntary exchange. A father gives his son a portion of capital, in your scenario, a bulldozer. A bulldozer is a capital good, as in, labor stored up into an energy-saving tool. The question we're asking here isn't "what property is to be permitted", but "what constitutes property?" and shall we be so naive as to think that property in land and the gains therefrom are conferred from a fiat decree?
The original land-ownerships were simply decrees of royal superiority over the masses. With the enlightenment they were solidified, in large part to Locke's homesteading treatise. But even Locke disagrees that in a society experiencing the extremities of the fixed supply of land, that good necessary for every increment of production, private ownership of land without recompense is a just form of property.
Except that this notion of property is not acknowledged by any arbiter of property disputes.
It could be, if and when a dispute occurs. We won't know for sure until it happens.
And if it were, it would result in a frantic dash to be the first "homesteader" of the "particles" of land, meaning a constant state of transition in land ownership and all the costs associated therewith.
A) Yah, there is always a mad dash to gain property, but that is the nature of the universe. Homesteading is not an easy task. It takes work.
B) I don't think you understand my position. If you work a field, any part of the field that you have molded to your will is yours until you sell it or abandon it. There is no constant flux in ownership. Take plowing, for example. If you plow a field, you have placed all that matter in a configuration of your design. That is control, and you now have ownership of all that matter, and it may not be disturbed without your consent. That is, unless abandon it.
dude6935: A) Yah, there is always a mad dash to gain property, but that is the nature of the universe. Homesteading is not an easy task. It takes work.
Except a mad dash to gain property in what can be produced is largely immaterial as the demand processed will invite more of that good. This is near contrary in regards to land. There is a strictly fixed supply of it and the more one gets the more economic clout one wields. If I buy 900 out of 1000 books in the world, book makers will understand that books are needed and will make them. When I buy 900 out of 1000 square units of land on the earth, what then? The scarcity can not be alleviated. Land ownership is a zero-sum game. If you're not an owner, you're a tenant.
I say mad dash because if it truly was on a "particle by particle" basis as you said earlier, a homesteader would have no right to the undisturbed soil beneath. Thus, a stranger could walk onto the property, dig down into said soil, plant something, and that soil would be his now, thanks to the particle by particle basis of property. There would be no security in land ownership.
When I buy 900 out of 1000 square units of land on the earth, what then? The scarcity can not be alleviated. Land ownership is a zero-sum game. If you're not an owner, you're a tenant.
When all land is homesteaded, maybe this will matter. This has not yet occurred, and I think it is unlikely to occur in my lifetime.
So is it particle by particle or absolute vertical-boundaries property?
dude6935: When all land is homesteaded, maybe this will matter. This has not yet occurred, and I think it is unlikely to occur in my lifetime.
Actually the effects are apparent in any situation wherein a homesteader has to resort to land of inferior quality to cultivate rather than becoming a tenant.
Yah, you can plant near my property, so long as you don't disturb any of my property. I don't see a problem here. I prefer particle by particle since it is less arbitrary.
So if I burrow underneath your cornfields and suck the dirt out, then I own everything beneath the layer of topsoil right?